In my last post, I began a discussion of my view of the SL art that makes up the BIW project. In sum, it was an apology on the importance of medium. I started to look at how the interplay between the virtual and real worlds is changing the way art can be made, viewed, and understood. In one of the most cogent critiques to this post, amyfreelunch argued that I was ignoring the intent of the unique artist in this view. She praised the importance of content and intent, while I had focused more on the affect of the medium and the form.
A good point to launch this discussion in more focus might be through DanCoyote’s Grapes of Math, now on view at BIW hanging in the air not far from the tower. 
The work is a series of floating purple and pink spheres, dangling off of each other in a formation that recalls a molecular structure. When approaching the piece, a little dialogue immediately pops up on the screen: “CAUTION: Grapes of Math is CUDDLY!” And it is quickly apparent why… the dangling “grapes” drop from their positions in the air to surround the viewer wherever he/she walks.
It is at first glance a structure that mimics the very strict configuration of molecules bound by the laws of physics; it morphs, however, into a structure that doesn’t seem to follow any laws of the material world at all the moment the viewer becomes involved in the piece. When the viewer enters the space, he/she affects the way that the piece hangs moves. What was once still comes to have motion, and what was once symmetrical and physical now bends at the presence of an audience.
This reading would fit well with DanCoyote’s philosophy, as understood through his symbol of “The Sixth Finger” (an image of a hand print with six fingers), which he describes as a symbol of “the computer cursor, or mankind’s intervention into the metaverse.”
The title of the work immediately brings to mind The Grapes of Wrath, a classic in the high school lit canon, which is a story of life and desperation during the Dust Bowl era. Tom Joad arrives back home after being released from prison only to find that his home town has been deserted. He sees a few handbills advertising hope in another land, California, and begins the sunset-chasing trek west in search of hope. Seeing on those roads all the others who have been seduced by the same handbills, he eventually realizes that the promise is not all that it was cut out to be.
(Interestingly, there is also story called the Grapes of Math, which is a spin-off parody that is part of the VeggieTales series. In a parable on forgiveness, a family of moody grapes comes to see the fruitlessness of their curmudgeonly ways, ending with the changing of their name to the “Grapes of Math.”)
DanCoyote’s work, however, seems to have little to do with either of these historical antecedents. In giving it a title that easily calls to mind the stories of the American Canon, and then not talking to that canon at all, I think that DanCoyote is reinforcing exactly my point of the last post: that SL is a land of no antecedents—or, what ultimately amounts to the same thing, a land where antecedents become relative and thus irrelevant.
The only theme maintained is, perhaps, an acceptance of the rejection of nostalgia. The globs are purple like grapes, but there the connection ends. The “math” is perhaps speaking to the molecular structure of the standing work, but this changes the minute that an avatar approaches. In the material world, we need to see in order to believe. But in SL, nothing is as it seems, and the promise of what is seen can always be broken.
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